iPhoto is a fantastic program. It makes my Canon S30 a much more enjoyable experience by reducing the efforts it takes to consume its results. But with a library 800 pictures and growing, it's clear that the first revision wasn't build with an eye on time complexity issues. iPhoto scales badly. Very badly.

Hence, it was with great frustration that I witnessed Steve Job's demonstration of iPhoto without a single mention of the speed problems, which left the impression that nothing had been done with this crippeling issue. That, fortunately, is not true.

Upon launching iPhoto, two major changes jump out. The first -- and the most important for people with a large number of photos -- is a dramatic speed increase, making correct usage of the iPhoto cache files. In the original iPhoto, users with large pictures or a large number of photos were greeted with slow access to their photo albums while the pictures loaded.

Exactly. Come January 25th, you'll be able to download the iPhoto and iMovie upgrades free of charge. iDVD upgrades have never been free (Apple claims that downloads would be too big because of all the themes) and will continue be to for pay.

So nothing changes for iTunes, iPhoto, or iMovie. Accept that you now have even more choice. Don't like to download it all (perhaps you're on narrow band?), then you can buy the iLife package and get it all for $49.

Ohh hehe did that make me sound dumb or what hehe.
Anyways, trying to download iPhoto from it's old download path, you get a "looking for something?" error.
I wasn't quite sure about the January 25th deal. I think the information on apple.com is somewhat poor then.
Maybe it's a sales trick. They have BUY icons, which is for the iLife package. They do somewhat make it sound like
you have to buy iLife to get iPhoto + iTunes + iMovie.

I just checked http://www.apple.com/itunes/ and it has a download link.
It even says iPhoto 3 and not iPhoto 2 as a part of iLife on the iTunes page. :)
Guess it'll all be fixed

So it's the 25th and I've searched the Apple site and no where do I find iPhoto 2 for free download. Why is Apple making this so hard to find?

Challenge by macAddict on January 25, 22:06

Its been delayed to the 31st to coincide with updated hardware, I hear. Apparently they want to announce it at the same time they announce the preloading of the package on new machines.

Challenge by Joe Buttigieg on January 26, 2:58

I am so upset about the delay.The Apple site should have the delay for us all to see. This is not like Apple.

Challenge by tb on January 30, 22:15

dumb decision to make a big deal about the date and then change it and not tell anyone. one of the guys in the store told me there is something on the packaging that would have given away what they wanted to announce. so they could have easily delayed the package product and still made the download available. Dumb decision!